Dr. Robby’s beef with Dr. Langdon, or a case of necrotizing fasciitis: Which condition will prove harder for the medical professionals of “The Pitt” to handle?

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Pitt for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

Fallout is a victim of its own success. It’s just aired a season of television that was meaner, sharper, grosser, funnier, and better looking than its already strong initial outing. Expectations for the finale, therefore, were always going to be high. Even so, I had every confidence that Fallout would meet the moment. 

But there’s an air of anticlimax to Fallout’s Season 2 finale. There were just a few too many payoffs deferred, a few too many secrets held back, a few too many storylines stretched thin. Don’t get me wrong, everything here was good, but there’s the nagging sense that the show decided to stop just short of being great.

You can say this for the finale, directed by Frederick E.O. Toye from a script by Karey Dornetto: It never lets you get bored. The action ricochets between half a dozen characters, locations, and even time periods at frequent intervals. By the end of the episode you’re going from one to the next every few seconds. All of them are compelling action/thriller sequences, featuring characters whose fates we care about.

I reviewed the season finale of Fallout for Decider.

Leland Palmer has a confession to make. Once again sobbing like the devastated father we knew before his hair went white, Leland admits that he killed Jacques Renault, the man he believed to be Laura’s killer. His motivation, he explains to Sheriff Truman, Agent Cooper, and Doc Hayward, was “absolute loss…more than grief. It’s deep down inside. Every cell screams. You can hear nothing else.” 

And indeed, we do hear the sound in Leland’s head as he sits in the interrogation room in the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Department, staring into the holes in the paneled walls. It’s the voice of his daughter, Laura, calling “Daddy!” over and over.

I reviewed the fourth episode of Twin Peaks Season 2 for Pop Heist. Gift link!

There’s a lot of good TV on right now. Even more specifically there’s a lot of good TV on HBO Max right now. In addition to Industry, there’s The Pitt and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms and Heated Rivalry. They’re all big buzzy dramas. (For the record, Knight isn’t a comedy or a dramedy, it’s a drama that’s funny, a subtle but crucial distinction.)

But even relative to its strong contemporaries, Industry is in a class by itself. It’s in the conversation with The Sopranos, Mad Men, and The Young Pope/The New Pope. I don’t know what that conversation is, necessarily — something to do with artful, ruthless television about how the cycle of venal but irresistible desire unmoors us from the morality that makes us human beings — but that’s where Industry is. Every time I sit down to write a review of this magnificent smorgasbord of sociopathy, my first thought is “Where do I begin?”

I reviewed this week’s Industry for Decider. What a show.

At any rate, with none of his squire’s privileges and protections of rank and title, Dunk straight-up decks a man he knows to be a Targaryen. Having seen his own father hanged as a boy, he is under no illusions about the nature of Westerosi justice. He knows standing up for Tanselle will cost him his life. Then he does it anyway.

Ser Duncan sees armed and armored agents of the state assaulting a woman of color — racism against the darker-skinned Dornish is pervasive at court during this time period in George R.R. Martin’s stories — and places her life above his own. He does this instinctively, without thinking, without letting the almost certainly fatal consequences deter him. He has seen the powerful doing evil, and he has chosen to fight it. For him, there’s really no choice to make at all.

When Aerion petulantly asks Dunk why he has chosen to throw his life away, it’s a rhetorical question. But it sheds more light on the prince than he realizes. Men like him really can’t understand that kind of selflessness, that sense of kinship with one’s fellow human beings. That inability is the tyrant’s biggest weakness. And it’s what gives free people hope for a fighting chance — a hope which belongs to all who invoke it.

I reviewed tonight’s A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms for the New York Times. (Gift link! And yes, I’m aware the byline is wrong as of press time.)

The only glimpse I caught of Twin Peaks during its initial run occurred on October 13, 1990. I was 12 years old, it was after 10 p.m., and I must have been flipping through the channels absent-mindedly before bed after the Golden Girls/Empty Nest block on NBC had ended. I was aware of the show by then, even as a person who’d only freshly become aware of “pop culture” as a phenomenon; the cast and the parodies were absolutely everywhere for months. But this was my first look at the show itself. 

I saw a one-armed man with a syringe have a seizure in a men’s room stall, then emerge in perfect calm, talking to an unseen figure like a man possessed. 

I was a squeamish kid. That was plenty of Twin Peaks for me.

I reviewed the third episode of Twin Peaks Season 2 for Pop Heist. Gift link!

Keep that in mind as you watch Coop’s subsequent actions throughout the episode. When he’s interviewing the GQ guy, he learns that the man was in love with the woman who blew up, though he knew she didn’t feel the same. When he starts to sob with grief, Cooper actually takes the risk of reaching out and holding the man’s hand. “Thank you for being kind,” the man says with shocking directness. “They’ve kind of been treating us like animals.” Light shines on them from above, transformed from the harsh glare of an interview room to a kind of visual benediction.

The same thing happens with Platt’s character. When Cooper enters the plastic-lined chamber where doctors are working on him, he’s struggling against his restraints, begging them to “talk to me like a real person” over and over. That’s exactly what Cooper does, calming Manny down by discussing their dogs and, again, holding the man’s hand. “You have a kind face,” Manny plaintively tells Cooper at one point, not incorrectly. Things go south after that, but that’s the virus’s fault, not Cooper’s. 

If you’re not a heterosexual cis man and you’re reading this, I need to impress upon you just how not done it is to reach out and hold the hand of basically any man, let alone a stranger. You have to willingly leap a pretty big gap of societal convention, patriarchal conformity, homophobia, and emotional stuntedness to do it — and you have to count on the recipient to be willing and able to do the same. I found these moments strangely beautiful as a result. Even amid all the camp body-horror shenanigans, the show makes time for men to treat each other decently. 

What’s more, Ashley and Manny aren’t simple stereotypes. Ashley, who’s kind of a gym bro, feels looked down upon by the elite fashionistas at Vogue. He knew Manny was cruisy in the men’s room — but he didn’t mind, because letting the guy check out his dick gave him a little confidence boost. “I’d give him a little show. Made me feel superior. Picked me up on down days or something.” Only after rambling like that does he catch himself: “Sorry. I don’t know why I’m telling you this.” 

It’s a humanizing comment, a funny and unexpected detail, and an illustration of how even straight gym bros who are madly in love with beautiful women and absolutely love to kiss and tell about it also engage in a little homosociality now and then for various reasons, all in one. It’s excellent writing from co-creators Ryan Murphy and Matt Hodgson, and the entire hospital segment is engagingly acted by Peters, Platt, and Halper.

I reviewed this week’s very good episode of The Beauty for Decider.

“The Pitt” loves its teachable moments. If a patient doesn’t have insurance, characters will discuss the way many families fall in a coverage no man’s land: too poor to afford health insurance, not poor enough to receive Medicaid. If a nurse ignores a deaf woman in favor of her A.S.L. translator, he — and the hearing members of the audience — will be gently reminded to address deaf people directly when speaking to them. If a secretly bulimic patient’s pneumonia is caused by her eating disorder, the safe money says that the friendly emergency room doctors will persuade her to accept help almost immediately. They will also note, correctly, that Black women with eating disorders are underdiagnosed.

Every episode of “The Pitt” features moments reminiscent of “very special episodes,” in which 1980s sitcoms briefly silenced their laugh tracks to address serious societal issues. Moments like those in “The Pitt” work as much like educational programming or civics lessons as they do drama.

But the skill of the actors and filmmakers goes a long way toward lessening the sense that you’re being lectured. It would indeed be nice to live in a world where the differing needs of people from different backgrounds and with different conditions were met with care, respect and understanding. No matter what cases come their way — and the cliffhanger ending, about an antibiotic resistant infection, suggests they’ve got a doozy on their hands — it is a safe bet that the staff of the Pitt, for all their imperfections, will teach by example.

I reviewed tonight’s episode of The Pitt for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

“Don’t think of them as human beings. Think of them as Americans.” 

When the creators of the Fallout games forcibly annexed Canada into their dystopian-future United States, they did so when this was a parody of American imperialism. How could they have known that before too long, American imperialism would be beyond parody? The incorporation of Canada as “the 51st State” is now an explicit, stated policy goal of the American government, to the extent that any of the demented synapse-firings of our pedophile protector president and the psychosexual fixations of his cadre of mutant Nazi viziers can be considered “policy” as we have historically understood the term. We live, and in an increasing number of cases we die, under the exact same kind of rule by demented billionaires Fallout presented as a worst-case scenario. A cheery thought, isn’t it?

I reviewed this week’s crackerjack episode of Fallout for Decider.

The longest-running A Song of Ice and Fire podcast on the blessed internet is back with a look at this week’s episode of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms — available here or wherever you get your podcasts! Come hang out with us as we hang out with what is, so far, a hangout show!

It was right around the time that his beautiful wife engineered a threesome with his equally beautiful assistant that I started to feel bad for Henry Muck. I watched this peer of the realm joylessly slam his marble-carved body into Hayley, an eager, gorgeous woman 15 years his junior. I watched his wife Yasmin — who made it happen, then oversaw it all with approval while languidly smoking a cigarette — order Hayley to spread her legs so Yasmin could suck “something that belongs to my husband, and therefore to me” directly out of her body. I watched all that, and I thought this poor bastard.

I reviewed last night’s Industry for Decider.

Although we’re only two short episodes into the season’s brief six-episode run, “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” is already a significant shift from the somber grandeur and Grand Guignol horror of “Game of Thrones” and “House of the Dragon.” Its tone is light. Its threats are decidedly less than world-shaking. Its protagonist is a commoner, not a noble. Its editing is positively zippy in places.

Moreover, while the show relies on the interplay of Peter Claffey’s decent but dense Dunk and Dexter Sol Ansell’s precocious problem child, Egg, the result is less a “Lone Wolf and Cub”/“The Last of Us” survival story than a mismatched buddy comedy. Ser Duncan may be the only contestant in the tourney dopey enough not to realize that there is more to his suspiciously knowledgeable and headstrong squire than meets the eye.

I reviewed this week’s episode of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

The final surprise? Like his boss, Antonio loves him some yacht rock. In another American Psycho riff, he defends the artistic legacy of Christopher Cross at length, decrying the image-first MTV era for tanking the average-looking singer-songwriter’s career. “The world is cruel to people who aren’t beautiful,” says the murderer-for-hire.

But he only says this after he sings the entire first verse and chorus of Cross’s smash hit single, the definitive yacht rock song, “Sailing.” And I mean the whole thing, every note, for approximately one minute and forty seconds of screentime — all while Jeremy, who’s both a) not a fan of Christopher Cross, and b) convinced this man is going to kill him at any moment, watches in perplexed horror. 

And dude, Anthony Ramos sings that song. He puts his heart and soul into it the way you do when you really want to kill it at karaoke. The funny, pop-culture-referencing hitman is an old archetype now — Pulp Fiction is over thirty years old — but rarely have I seen it done with this kind of cheerful gusto. Between this and his fine work on Marvel’s Ironheart, the guy plays a great villain precisely because he doesn’t really read as villainous.

I reviewed the third episode of The Beauty for Decider.

“The Pitt” is not a show for the cynical. The show is full to bursting with heartfelt declarations of devotion, moving rapprochements between estranged loved ones, copious tears of both sadness and joy, and celebrations of cooperation and community. This sweet stuff can be hard to swallow when you’ve been weaned on a bitter diet of prestige antihero dramas like “The Sopranos.”

But “The Pitt” is not a show about normal circumstances. Every patient who arrives in the E.R. introduces a new set of potentially life-or-death stakes for the core cast to handle. Even cases that aren’t potentially fatal often reveal some horrible defect in the American health care system.

The friends and family members by the bed sides of their loved ones are alternately terrified, furious, confused, devastated and grateful beyond belief. Why wouldn’t they be? A group of competent medical professionals just healed the person they care about — or failed to. Emotions run hot and close to the surface. Apply enough pressure, as circumstances in the Pitt do, and those emotions explode with volcanic force.

In essence, the hospital setting of “The Pitt” is a cheat code. It allows us to access our deepest, most profound emotions without embarrassment because those big emotions match the scale of the triumphs and tragedies we witness on an hour-by-hour basis.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Pitt for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

“I think everything that we do, from the minute we hit puberty to the second we die, is about sex. We go to the gym, we work on our bodies, we cut our hair, we fix our teeth, our tits, torturing ourselves for some promotion — and everything that we do is about our universal, unquenchable thirst to all be considered attractive enough to get laid.” —Agent Cooper Madsen

Put a pin in that speech. We’re gonna come back to it.

I reviewed the second episode of The Beauty for Decider. It’s fun and sharp!

The series premiere of The Beauty, co-created, co-written, and directed by Ryan Murphy, depicts a deranged model played by Bella Hadid going on a killcrazy rampage at a Balenciaga runway show, embarking on a high-speed motorcycle chase on the streets of Paris, resuming her killcrazy rampage with bone shards sticking out of her leg, then exploding like a blood-filled water balloon, while the Prodigy’s “Firestarter” plays.

There. I’ve now told you everything you need to know to determine whether or not you’ll enjoy The Beauty. It’s a Ryan Murphy joint through and through, from the high-profile cameo by a beautiful famous woman to the emphasis on sensation over substance. Of course, sensation can be its own kind of substance, and your mileage on whether Murphy ever makes it so may vary. I find all this work in the true-crime genre to be excellent, for what it’s worth. The crimes going on here, however, are very much not true.

I reviewed part one of the three-part series premiere of The Beauty for Decider.

Telling this story to her husband, Cooper Howard, when he confronts her with what he knows about the plan to drop the bombs does not have the effect Barb intended. When he asks her how she could sentence millions, billions of people just like them and their daughter to death to protect their daughter herself, she asks, wouldn’t he? I don’t think he would, at least not in this pre-Ghoul incarnation.

But plenty of people not only would, they’d jump at the chance. Just the other day I saw a viral post in which father of a newborn boast he’d wipe out whole continents just to see his baby daughter smile. Odds are that this asshole doesn’t even change the kid’s diaper without being asked, but here he is, champing at the bit to commit genocide to show what a good dad he is. 

Remind you of anyone? “Some things just never change,” Hank MacLean tells his daughter Lucy in the present. “People just wanna kill each other, don’t they? I think it’s the only way that people feel safe. It’s ironic, isn’ tit? To feel safe they have to kill each other.” It’s the raison d’être of the fascism we see playing out on American streets in 2026: In order to assuage our baseless fears, we must inflict terror on others.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Fallout for Decider.

When presented with a banquet, an absolute feast of an episode like this one, the temptation is to try to swallow it all in one go. The challenge is to resist that temptation. An episode like “The Commander and the Grey Lady,” the second in Industry’s fourth season, is a meal you can return to for seconds, thirds, and leftovers. Once again written and directed by series co-creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, it’s the kind of episode that makes you ask the host for the recipe — or the help, as the case may be. Best to sample a few delicacies at a time rather than try to gobble it all down.

I reviewed this week’s Industry for Decider.

The longest-running A Song of Ice and Fire podcast on god’s internet is going weekly for the duration of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, baby! Listen to the all-new Boiled Leather Audio Hour on the series premiere — the debut of Dunk and Egg — right here or wherever you get your podcasts!

The motorcycle parked outside the Palmer house lets you know who’s inside. James Hurley and his girlfriend Donna Hayward have come to visit Maddy Ferguson, the out-of-town cousin of their beloved friend Laura Palmer. In fact, they’ve come to record a love song, using a tape recorder, an old-fashioned microphone, and James’s acoustic guitar. While Maddy and Donna sit side by side on the floor and coo their dreamy backing vocals, James takes lead. His tremulous voice sings a song called “Just You,” which sounds like something you might have slow-danced to at the 1961 Spring Fling. 

Donna’s mistake is believing that the song is for her. It might have been when he wrote it. It might even have been when he started singing it. But as the song continues, the dynamic shifts. As Maddy’s eyes seek out James with increasingly obvious hunger, and he responds by looking back at her instead of Donna, Donna’s own eyes grown desperate, pleading, and finally tearful. Eventually it’s too much, and she gets up and runs off.

“I’m trembling, James,” she says when he comes to comfort her. “You made me.” It’s true, but not in the heated way she intends it to sound. The thought of losing James has rocked her. 

Maddy just sits there looking uncomfortable for this bit.

Then something happens. As she looks absently into the depths of the Palmer family’s first floor, a man emerges into view. Slowly he approaches, crawling over the sofa, scrambling over the coffee table, staring straight into the camera until he’s right in our faces. Maddy screams uncontrollably, even as Donna and James rush to her side to comfort her. She’s seen Laura’s killer. She’s seen Bob.

These few short minutes of screentime begin with a song so sugary sweet it passes through camp and back around into to dead-serious sincerity. There’s just no denying the passion and pain in the glances exchanged between the three singers. Add in Donna’s attempt to kiss James back into loving her and you’ve got something desperately romantic, in line with the star-crossed relationships of Blue Velvet or Mulholland Drive. But then, after some brief comic relief courtesy of Maddy’s third-wheel awkwardness, comes what remains one of the scariest shots ever aired on television: Frank Silva’s Bob, coming for all of us.

I reviewed the second episode of Twin Peaks Season 2 for Pop Heist. Gift link!